Company:

Ivanhoe Grammar School is a multicampus
coeducational Anglican
school providing students and
their families access to outstanding
educational opportunities. The
Ivanhoe Campus incorporates
Buckley House and The Ridgeway
Campus, offering Early Learning
to Year 12 to approximately 2000
students. The Plenty Campus in
Mernda offers Prep to Year 12 with
all the benefits of a smaller school
environment with just over 500
students.

Challenge:

Ivanhoe Grammar School’s need
to communicate in a timely and
accurate manner was being
adversely affected by an unreliable,
overly complex and costly legacy
data backup system. It was
undermining the availability and
certainty of delivering critical
applications to serve its 5,500 plus
strong community of teachers,
students, parents and alumni.

Results:

Reduced backup from two days to
six hours

Achieved cost savings of up to 75%
and space savings by 30%

Enjoyed higher availability of critical
applications and better support

The Business Challenge

Ivanhoe Grammar School has been educating young people since 1915, and while
much has changed since their humble beginnings, the philosophy of their founding
Headmaster is still at the core of their practices. They believe in supporting students
to be the best they can be in their academic and co-curricular achievements, and in
the development of their individual character. The School encourages a strong ethos
of service to others, and provide opportunity for students to be active contributors
to their community.

Ivanhoe Grammar School serves a vibrant community of 300 teachers, 2,000
students and more than 3,000 parents. Enabling the School to keep this community
informed is the task of the School’s 15-person IT team. The School’s communication
network is 95% virtualised - four data centres handling 10 hosts and 126 virtual
machines.

Winston Mattson, Director of Systems & Infrastructure, who heads the IT team
describes the important commitment the school has undertaken to communicate
in a timely and accurate manner with its widespread community of teachers,
students, parents, and alumni, numbering more than 5,500. “We don’t send physical
communications to parents anymore, everything is digital – including the intranet
for parents on things as varied as consents for camps, paying bills or school reports.
It can also be distributing time sensitive news about our flourishing alumni network
and their programs and events.”

The School has two production sites and two disaster recovery sites. He recalls the
problems they experienced with a legacy system in backing up and replicating the
57 terabytes of data within the network. “The major pain points were driven by the
complexity of the system, the uncertainty surrounding the availability of critical data
and dealing with our clients’ complaints about the limited capability of our systems.

“This was exacerbated by the high licensing costs. The value was just not there.
We began looking for a cost effective, straight-forward availability solution for the
school and it had to be easy to manage. In spite of testing several products we did
not find one that met our requirements. They were too complex. The last thing
we need or want is to have 50% of a team member’s time spent on trying to run
the software or just trying to chase after support. It is too tiresome, wasteful and
expensive.”

The Veeam Solution

Mattson explains: “It took 12 months to arrive at what we believe was the right
solution. When selecting products we always look to operate our data centre in a
configuration that is fully supported and tested by vendors in their own labs. Our
philosophy is to run in an optimal configuration. We were impressed to see that the
HPE 3PAR storage was fully supported by Veeam and would work with it “out-ofthe-
box”. Therefore, it made sense to deploy Veeam Backup & Replication™ along
with our HPE 3PAR storage, HPE servers with HPE networking and VMware.

“The Veeam Backup & Replication™ took only one week to test and place into
production. Deploying it was so easy we did not need advanced technical
knowledge or expertise. It was a very happy and positive experience. It just worked.
All that time wasting is no longer a factor.” says Matt Wojcieszak, ICT Network
Administrator at Ivanhoe Grammar School.

He added: “Veeam is a very scalable, powerful and agentless solution. It was
so much easier to manage and operate. I understand Veeam was built from the
outset to handle virtualisation and with our environment being 95% virtualised, it
eliminated the complexity of the system and delivered the complete set of features
we needed.”

Ivanhoe Grammar School’s IT capability is benefitting from speedier data recovery,
accompanied by significant cost savings. Wojcieszak highlights how the school is
achieving a greater enhanced dimension of Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and
Recovery Time Objective (RTO). “We had a different type of storage and backup
with the legacy system. Now with Veeam our certainty about data availability is a
huge 60 per cent improvement – a full backup of our HPE storage that could take up
to two days is now completed in around six hours.

“This speedier backup translates into maintenance and administration cost savings
of up to 75 per cent. Licensing costs have been halved as a result of deploying the
Veeam Backup & Replication solution.”

While speed and savings are valued benefits, the favourite feature for Mattson and
his team is the simplicity and intuitive nature of the Veeam solution. “Our legacy
system was pretty complex; In the past we spent a lot of time and resources to
double check that the backup was completed. It is very crucial to have that assurance
and with Veeam SureBackup we just know that all backup is tested. It now takes a
fraction of the time to verify the efficiency and completeness of the backup. The
time gained means we can concentrate on other infrastructure projects such as
educational research, or improving the services we provide to our community.”

Instant VM Recovery® was another impressive surprise: “Veeam lets us bring the
VM back on line so quickly, restoring from the backup in minutes. That is a stunning
improvement. It lets us upgrade or do patching before we touch the production
environment, so that when we want to test a new solution it is a good place for our
developers to develop new applications.” says Wojcieszak.

He adds: “Using Veeam® Explorer™, the School can quickly browse, search, restore
and selectively export an application item. Once again it takes just minutes. While we
had this capability before, the action with Veeam Explorer is more intuitive and the
result is much, much quicker.”

The Results

Backup time reduced from two days to six hours
“One-click disaster recovery means we are confident we are fully protected and
can recover data from any platform in a faction of time we used to take. A full
backup now takes around six hours compared to two days in the past. I’m talking
about minutes here to go back to any point in time – which is a very good result.”

Achieved cost savings of up to 75% and space savings by 30%
The School has halved expensive licensing costs; saved up to 75 per cent in
maintenance and administration costs. Storage space for backup files has also now
been reduced by 30 per cent.

Enjoyed higher availability of critical applications and better support
Mattson says: “Veeam helps keep the lights on for our systems. Should there be
any issues about the availability of applications, we get good alerts so we know
what we need to do to fix it. If that can’t be done we have excellent 24/7 support
where we can log a job and be sure to get Veeam expertise to sort it out. Definitely,
I would recommend Veeam to my peers or any other organisations.”